As I announced at the end of last year and earlier this month, I am committing myself to reading (at least) one translated novel each month.
To help with this, I’ve created a TBR list which lays out each of the books I’ll be reading throughout the year, in case anyone would like to join in.
This month, my book was Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, translated from Japanese by Geoffrey Trousselot.
This is the second part of my reading wrap up for 2019, which will focus on the books themselves that I read last year.
Yesterday I posted a blog about all the statistics linked to my reading, which if you’re interested in that side of things as well you can also read.
However, I’m going to speak about some statistics to do with the books I read, using Goodreads’ wrap up for the year, as well as picking out some of my favourite and least favourite books of the year. Obviously it’s all subjective, if I hated one of your favourite books I’m sorry, my dislike of it doesn’t mean it’s a bad book by any means.
If you’re interested in seeing all of the books I read, there’s a full list at the end of this post.
It’s a new year, and a new decade! Which means that it’s time to look at my past year and review the different statistics based on my reading.
Each year, I look at a range of different statistics related to my reading, such as the number of books I’ve read, whether I made my Goodreads goal, how many each month, the gender of the authors, how many star ratings I gave out, the lot.
I’m going to be splitting this end of year look back into two different posts, this will purely be statistics based, while my next post will look at books separately, my favourites, my least favourite, shortest, longest etc, which should be coming tomorrow.
As I have mentioned in my previous post, this year I’m starting a project which will see me read at least one dedicated translated work of fiction each month. If you haven’t read my introduction, you can give it a skim here before getting on with the books, or if you’re just here to see some of my TBR for the year, keep reading.
Each month, I’ve picked a different book, translated from a different language, which I’ll be reading in that month.
At the end of the month, I’ll have a dedicated post to speak about it in a separate book review.
The only rule for this I’ve set myself is that each of the 12 books I’ve chosen have to be translated from a different language. I’ve tried to vary the genres as well, just to keep it different.
Photo by Kira auf der Heide on Unsplash
Hello, and welcome to my new series, which looks at translated fiction novels, and the importance of reading outside of our own countries. This is a longer read to introduce what I’m on about, but there will be a book post coming after this to accompany this!
I don’t consciously force myself to pick up translated books when I’m at the library or bookstore, but I am trying to make more of an effort to push myself to read books which were originally written in a language other than my native one, which is English.
This year I feel like I’ve made real progress in both the books I’m reading, and the ones I’m picking up on a whim.
With that being said, obviously I don’t read nearly enough outside of English works, and it’s something I’m going to try and focus on for the future.
The festive period is already upon us, and it’s almost time to start compiling my end of the year posts, and hopes for next year.
However, before I start getting ahead of myself, I thought I would wrap up everything that I read last month.
November was a fairly good reading month for me, and I ended up reading 11 books.
By this point I have so many unread books on my shelves that I want to read that it’s getting nearly impossible to pick which one I want to read next.
However, with the weather getting colder now, I thought it would be a good opportunity to pick up some of the books I’ve got that are a bit more wintery.
I’ve inadvertently picked up quite a few books this month, so I thought I’d take some time to show you what I’ve picked up, because I don’t do hauls as often as I really should.
I’m only showing physical novels that I’ve added to my shelves here, but if you’re interested in some recently picked up e-books let me know and I can definitely do a separate post about those, because I tend to get more of those than I do physical books.
All the synopsis in this post are taken from Goodreads, as it is much better at explaining books I haven’t read than I am.
I took a break last week because I wasn’t feeling well and was super busy, and this week I’m even more sick than I was before, typical!
But, ignoring the usual seasonal sniffles, I thought it was finally time that I wrap up the books I read last month, because it’s already the 12th of November! Time flies.
I’m quite surprised that I managed to get through eight books last month, as I also moved house, so the past few weeks have been a bit crazy.
I’ve been using my library quite a lot the past few months as well, which is great.
Hello, it is away to be November tomorrow, which means that it’s time to take part in non-fiction November.
This is the first year I’ve ever taken part, I’m not normally one for a lot of non-fiction, but I thought it would give me a good opportunity to get through some of the books I’ve had on my shelves for ages.
I’m not going to be exclusively reading non-fiction, and I probably won’t be getting through all of these, but I wanted to share the ones I have on my shelf, and what I think I might get to at some point soon.
My favourites are memoirs, but I’ve tried to give myself a little bit of a range of things to read.
Emma's Mini Library 